**Author details**

volumetric water content of soil for 32 layers during water infiltration in the soil. Blue, green, red, cyan, and yellow lines indicated 1, 9, 17, 25, and 32 soil layers, respectively. In the first layer, the normalized volumetric water content increases very fast and reaches a saturated condition at around 100–300 s. The degree of saturation for 1st layer starts to decrease after supplying of water was stopped at 300 s and relative constant was at around 0.3 from 700 to 1000 s. For 9th and 17th layers, the degree of saturation increases sequencing and reaches a saturated condition at a similar time (i.e., at around 450 s) and starts to decrease at 500 s, while for the 25th layer, the degree of saturation increases at around 300 s and reaches a stable condition at 700 s with a degree of saturation at around 0.85. Moreover at the 32nd layer, the degree of saturation increases at 630 s, and the degree of saturation reaches 0.2 at the end of the experiment (i.e., 1000 s). This experiment showed clearly the availability of air trapped at the bottom of soil in the vessel (see **Figure 6a**).

*Modern Applications of Electrostatics and Dielectrics*

**Figure 7** also shows the image sequencing of water infiltration (**Figure 7a**) and normalized volumetric water content of each layer of the soil column (**Figure 7b**). In **Figure 7a**, it can be seen that the silty sand has a normalized relative permittivity value around 0.3 before water infiltrate to the soil column. It can be caused by two possibilities, (i) because of the moisture content stored in the soil and (ii) because the soil particles are very small and compact, so the porosity of soil is also small which causes no air cavity in the soil. From **Figure 7b** we can see how the water infiltrates into the each layer clearly. The first layer has increased drastically around the first 30 s. It is easily understood that the top layers will reach the maximum value of normalized volumetric water content first, because these layers get the first

Some equations between the relative permittivity and volumetric water content have been described in this study. From this study, there is an equation that has demonstrated efficacy in conformity with the data of experimental results, that is, equation proposed by [32]. This equation uses the porosity factor as a parameter in the relationship between volumetric water content and relative permittivity. Normalized volumetric water content of soil has been analyzed in this study using ECVT system. Normalized volumetric water content can be shown and analyzed layer per layer of soil column for every second. We found that the ECVT system has advantages in measuring soil water content which are nondestructive and noninvasive to the sample object, 3D image, and real-time monitoring for water

The authors wish to thank the Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher

Education of Republic of Indonesia, for providing the research grand.

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

supply of water.

**6. Conclusion**

infiltration.

**84**

**Acknowledgements**

**Conflict of interest**

Mukhlisin Muhammad<sup>1</sup> \* and Saputra Almushfi<sup>2</sup>


\*Address all correspondence to: mmukhlis2@gmail.com

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
